One in five women over the age of 18 who regularly use the internet is on Pinterest, which had an estimated 23 million users as of July.

…But the site’s popularity highlights an uncomfortable reality: Pinterest’s user-generated content, which overwhelmingly emphasizes recipes, home decor, and fitness and fashion tips, feels like a reminder that women still seek out the retrograde, materialistic content that women’s magazines have been hawking for decades – and that the internet was supposed to help overcome.

…Pinterest – which drives more traffic to marthastewart.com and marthastewartweddings.com than Facebook and Twitter combined – has become impossible to ignore, even as critics deride it as “the Mormon housewife’s image bookmarking service of choice.” But it’s much more than a collection of pretty pictures. In fact, the site seems like one big user-curated women’s magazine – from the pre-internet era. Sites like Jezebel were created as an antidote to women’s print magazines, which are rife with diet, fitness and dressing tips. The internet has for many years now been thought of as a place where women can find smarter, meatier reads just for them.

Instead, there’s Pinterest: heavy on recipes (diet and otherwise), inspirational quotes, exercise tips, and aspirational clothes and homes. Kitchen porn, cupcake porn, bracelet porn – any kind of eye candy you can think of is probably on Pinterest, waiting for the next Pinner to covet it enough to re-pin it. People don’t go to Pinterest for articles, they go there to scrapbook every imaginable physical aspect of their dream lives, right down to the Mason jar candle holders you really hope to get around to DIY-ing for your next cocktail party.

On Pinterest, you’d never know that sites like Jezebel and Feministing had hit the internet.

Here’s a crazy thought: Maybe the average woman doesn’t spend her days obsessing over abortion, free birth control, and fighting the imaginary patriarchy like liberal feminists. Maybe Pinterest is so “heavy on recipes (diet and otherwise), inspirational quotes, exercise tips, and aspirational clothes and homes. Kitchen porn, cupcake porn, (and) bracelet porn” because that’s what women are actually interested in. Maybe that’s also why most women’s magazine focus on those same areas instead of the virtues of “Slut Walks” and the male/female power dynamic.

That chafes feminists to no end because they hate admitting that there are any differences between men and women (except that women are better, naturally), so seeing evidence that most women are interested in cooking, looking pretty, and having a nice house spoils the little fantasy world they’ve built for themselves. Of course, that’s a good thing because liberal feminism has been out of touch with reality for a long time and anything that gets those feminist heads back in the real world is doing a public service.